“Cyber Pearl Harbour” more likely to be launched by U.S. than against U.S., security expert says

After American defence secretary Leon Panetta warned his own nation that businesses and government need to better protect their computer systems to prevent a “cyber Pearl Harbor” – a cataclysmic cyber attack that would take down large parts of North American networks and be more devastating than the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington – Internet security experts started chiming in.

Mikko Hypponen, CEO of F-Secure, one of the world’s largest Internet security firms, thinks that specific scenario is pretty unlikely.

“A common fear people have is that somebody would somehow take down the internet. If we forget the technical difficulties of such an attack, let’s think for a moment who would want to do that and why,” he wrote in a recent blog post on the company’s website.

He argues that hacker groups like spammers, infiltrators and activist groups like Anonymous are unlikely to attempt to destroy networks since they value the information those networks provide so much, often even relying on them for a source of income. If Anonymous were to destroy the Internet, they would also largely cease to exist. Foreign governments, he argues, fall into a similar category.

“And a foreign nation-state could probably benefit much more by tapping internet traffic, using the net for espionage or by inserting forged traffic,” he said.

And looking at the history of cyber attacks run by nation-states, the U.S. appears to be one of the biggest players, he said.

If we look for offensive cyber attacks that have been linked back to a known government, we mostly find attacks that have been launched by United States, not against them … When New York Times ran the story linking US Government and the Obama administration to these attacks, White House started an investigation on who had leaked the information. Note that they never denied the story. They just wanted to know who leaked it.”

Of course that’s over-simplifying, since China has also been known to use their online clout to gain intelligence on other countries, including Canada.

But what makes the United States and Canada interesting targets is that a huge portion of the population is online and sharing an enormous amount of unprotected information. A foreign country doesn’t have to take out the Internet, they just have to shatter public trust in it for enormous sections of the economy to come crashing down. That could ultimately be more devastating than an attack on the raw infrastructure.

As Hypponen also notes, “as United States is doing offensive cyber attacks against other countries, certainly other countries feel that they are free to do the same. Unfortunately the United States has the most to lose from attacks like these.”